After the rains, walking outside and breathing deeply, sweet, crisp air is refreshing. Clear skies heighten resplendent tree canopies. Plants and flowers burst with color. Nature’s vivaciousness infuses a sense of vitality. Each step can feel lively. Life abounds. What can be surprising is how much diverse life can abound beneath our feet.
That’s easy to forget or forego when traipsing along a paved sidewalk or street, but step into a garden or along an untrammeled natural path and be tickled by the life in the soil below. The reality is soil is complex, a wondrous realm of elements that in one sense have been decomposing since the history of Earth began. Soil teems with myriad microbial life: bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa, invertebrates or arthropods (worms, “roly-polies,” sow-bugs, etc.) that weave, wriggle and channel through the soil’s microbiome, in fact a “micro-food web.”
Nature’s understory—the ecosystem’s activity underground— is one where healthy soil beholds mycelium, snowy lace, a kind of glue, to bond organic matter in textured networks. As fungi and bacteria digest organic matter to make available nutrients for plants, the network of mycelium transfuses those with trace minerals, nitrogen and other chemicals, along with water, to roots that carry back and distribute needed nourishment for microbial organisms below.
This constancy of cycles underfoot, ordinarily unseen by even the most attentive gardener, includes the natural carbon cycle, which enables photosynthesis essential to our life and strengthening our capacity to confront the climate crisis. In photosynthesis CO2 uses sunlight to create energy in the forms of sugars and carbohydrates for us to eat, releasing oxygen for us to breathe. Organic carbon is then sequestered in the soil for a diverse microbiome that also prevents CO2 spewing into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. (Photosynthesis extensively takes place in oceans, too.)
We hear a lot about the benefits of trees for oxygen, attesting to the expanse of the Amazon and rainforests to be “the lungs of Earth.” Rain forests, like gardens and urban agriculture, are part of natural ecosystems and habitats embedded in soil, emerging from soil, decomposing into soil. Caring about soil health matters for personal and planetary wellbeing.
Happily, the adage, “We are what we eat,” may be extended to “The soil is what is eaten.” The latter is the case both in terms of fungi and bacteria digestion feeding plant roots, noted above, and in terms of compost converting kitchen and food scraps or gardening trimmings and other compostable items (untreated cardboard, unbleached paper, bamboo products, etc.) into a rich soil nutrient. Soil humus is the sable-colored organic material from the decay of plants or animals. Over billions of years, Nature’s processes and cycles have sustained the soil.
Today, recycling the organic materials that we use in our daily habits for composting, instead of trashing those for the landfill, means that we can contribute to and relate to Nature genuinely as a daily practice that can enrich the soil. Composting also prevents the food-stuff and other things from breaking down and exuding methane, an intense greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. The California law and local ordinance that require us to recycle organic ingredients to be composted reflects a policy that regards the natural systems as primary to benefit us and strengthen climate resiliency.
The magic of turning what we eat into compost can be fun, which is why so many kids thrill to imagine their breakfast, lunch or dinner, after months, becoming loamy, dark soil with earthworms and other wrigglers that give way to children’s laughter or shrills when held. Compost is key to regenerative gardening, farming and agriculture. “Re-generative” means growing the soil’s vitality to produce nutritious foods and hearty habitat. By contrast, synthetic fertilizers, often fossil fuel based, can cause havoc with our environment as those can displace essential microbes, cause salinification and leave inorganic nitrogen to wash away into the watershed, waterways and oceans.
Regenerative practices in home gardens, community/communal gardens, urban agriculture or landscaping rely on our best ecological understandings evinced in millennia of Indigenous knowledge, close observations, and restorative environmental science studies. Regenerative practices also reflect humanity’s interdependence with Nature. Santa Monica’s ground-breaking Sustainability Rights Ordinance acknowledges the rights of Nature and the community’s rights as fundamental, codifying that reality. Fostering our relationship with Nature, indeed appreciating that we are a part of Nature, is confirmed as we delve into the soil’s story as our own and the life beneath our feet grounds us.
Come and learn more with James Oliver, a mycologist, and celebrating Earth Month at Santa Monica’s Main Street Community Gardens, Saturday, April 8, at 9 – 11, for our next in a series on the soil microbiome. The workshop begins at 10. See you in the soil!
